


The Cataclysm Game

by AshToSilver



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - War, Interviews, M/M, Transcribed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 11:43:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2023866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshToSilver/pseuds/AshToSilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An interview concerning the bat, the clown, and the war that changed everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cataclysm Game

**Author's Note:**

> This was a short I wrote a while ago, previously as a prologue to a longer series. However, I started writing AIIWPTS instead, and decided to turn this into a much shorter series. 
> 
> This will be a six-parter, alternating between Joker and Bruce, starting with post-war and ending pre-war. Details will be revealed as they come. No scheduled release date.
> 
> EDIT: this has been abandoned and now stands alone.
> 
>  **EDIT Aug/2016:** I have changed my username, I am now going by AshToSilver on AO3 and [my new Tumblr](http://ashtosilver.tumblr.com/)! You can still call me Alex, but I no longer have a day of the week in my name.

[The below entry are taken from the personal transcript and writings of Sarah Yale, of her interview with the Gothamite JOKER.]

**Riverside Restaurant, Port Norris, New Jersey, September 17th, 2023**

[ **Port Norris is only just beginning to slow down, after becoming a military town in early 2010. Once boosting a population of under 2,000, over 5,000 now call this overcrowded town home. I'm meeting with the** **infamous 'Joker' - no other known alias - for a postwar interview. He arrived a few minutes after me, dressed sharply in grey and muted purple and shook my hand warmly. Despite being well into his sixties, he seems healthy and relatively happy to see me, which is more then can be said of most Gothamites and the other guests at the restaurant.]**

**YALE: Good afternoon, I'm Sarah Yale from The Press of Atlantic City, we spoke over the phone earlier this week. ... Do... you still go by... your name?**

JOKER: Lovely to see you, Ms. Yale. If you don't mind me saying - you look even lovelier then you sound. Yes, just 'Joker' is fine. Trust me, it gets easier to use the longer you try.  **[He chuckles at this.]**

**YALE:** **Oh- well, thank you. That's nice of you to say. How are you today?**

JOKER: Well, I'm alive, aren't I? **[He laughs.]**  Bit strange being this far out of Gotham City.

**YALE:** **I thought Gotham was only a twenty minute drive...?**

JOKER: Anywhere beyond our shores is far for us.

**YALE: Perhaps that's a good place to start. Now that the war's over, how do you feel about being able to leave Gotham once again?**

JOKER:  **[Laughs.]**  Well, to begin with, I wasn't really allowed to leave Gotham before the war. Hell, I wasn't even suppose to leave Arkham. Any freedom is strange freedom, these days. **[He pauses.]**  And to be perfectly honest, I'm still not fond of going outside the city now. I mean, I've left plenty of times to go to conferences, as a house ambassador, for treaty talks, things like that, but it's still not the same as being in the city. I still stand out too much outside, even if it's in a different way.

**YALE:** **Different how?**

JOKER: Before the war, I was called a monster. I won't deny that I did... well, I'm sure you've heard stories. If I wasn't allowed freedom, it was because I was a criminal. If people pointed to me on the streets, it was because they feared me. If I couldn't even get service at a place like this...? It was because they were calling the police instead. Now, it's like they've all forgotten. I'm still feared. I'm still dangerous. But it's a good thing.

**YALE: There's a good way of being feared?**

JOKER: To the Gotham people, there is. I'm their admiral. Their... **[he waves his hand in dismissing disinterest.]**  war hero. I was the one who held the Trigate Bridge against the fourth invasion. I was the one who started the Amusement Mile Riots. I drove the navy from Tricorner Yards. I led five gangs and two mafia crime lords into the final battle of Archie. When the bat fell from the top of Wayne Tower, I was the one who reached through a broken window and grabbed his hand.  **[Here, he pauses.]**  When I was younger, I made people desperate, I made them aggressive. When later came, that allowed them to  _survive_. I'd shown them the light. You had to fight back. Giving up wasn't an option - giving up meant  _becoming_  someone like me; or a victim to someone like me. I taught them that. That was important. That got people moving. It saved lives.

**YALE: You saved a lot of people's lives.**

JOKER: I suppose I did.

**YALE: Could you** **elaborate?**

JOKER: I could.

**YALE: Will you?**

JOKER: No.  **[For a moment, he looks very serious - it's almost terrifying.]**

**YALE: ... Very well. Let's talk about your reputation outside of Gotham. You said people feared you, but it doesn't sound like that's what Gothamites think of you.**

JOKER: Gothamites see me as a dangerous man. But the only people who survived in Gotham were dangerous themselves. So it leads to a feeling of... almost kinship, I suppose? I don't know, I'm not the best at those sort of things.  **[A pause here.]**  Everyone else... they were the ones who felt my wrath. I'm feared not as a criminal, but as an enemy. A capable enemy. Put me in a room full of veterans, and they'll be terrified - because they fought me. They  _know me_. They can't attack me, they can't kill me, they can't do anything to me anymore. Because now we're all holding hands, making daisy chains, braiding each other's hair and... you know what I mean. How do you deal with an enemy you can't fight?

**YALE: I suppose that's a good point.**

JOKER: If they can't stop me, that means nobody can make me do anything I don't want to do. Also means nobody's going to like me very much. That's why it's different. There's no resistance. But there's fear, there's anger. There's a lot of hate. I... understand that. But I can walk into a store now and buy myself dinner.  **[He chuckles with something that could be called happiness.]** That's worth it.

**YALE: I can imagine that's a nice feeling.**

JOKER: Only took a decade or three and a civil war to get there! **[He laughs again.]**

**YALE: ... Yes, I suppose. Let's talk** **about some of your comrades - you mentioned the Owlman on the phone?**

JOKER: Oh yes! Good ol' Damian.

 **YALE:**   _ **Damian?**_ **Damian... as in Damian Wayne - Bruce Wayne's son?**

JOKER: The very same!

**YALE: But... Damian died in 2009. His death was quoted as the primary reason the Batman became hostile to outsiders. How could he have been the Owlman?**

JOKER:  **[Laughs.]**  You shouldn't believe everything you see on TV, you know. Though... you are technically right. He  _was_  dead.

**YALE: Was?**

JOKER:  **[Giggles.]**  For three minutes. His brother shocked him with a taser. Got his heart started, got him breathing. He died again, a couple of hours later, on the operation table. Blood lost. They revived him again. Tough kid. Still, took him a long to recover - damaged spinal cord. Couldn't walk. Technically, still can't.

 **YALE: He can't- But- He _fought_. He can walk!**   **And how did nobody know he was still alive?**

JOKER: Bruce did  _not_  take his firstborn son dying very well. To put it mildly, he flipped. He wasn't even in the cave while they were trying to save him. He was out fighting - damn near refused to come back. I had to be the one to go get him, pull him out of his funk.  **[He laughs again, but it's a bit sad, and fades quickly.]**  He was half-delusional. Convinced everyone the best way to handle this was to make sure Damian 'stayed dead'. He buried an empty coffin while the kid was in a coma. Kept him indoors, away from people.

**YALE: I met the Owlman once- very briefly, at a conference. He doesn't seem like the type to stay hidden.**

JOKER: He didn't take it very well, once he woke up. Didn't take anything after that very well. I ended up... hanging around a bit, around then, so I saw it first hand. Kid was pissed; he was trained to be a top-level assassin, even then and suddenly he was being handled like a baby. It got ugly.

**YALE: Could you explain that?**

JOKER: I only saw parts of it, I kept getting called in to deal with Bruce's aftermath. All I know is, Damian was convinced he could create an exoskeleton that would allow him to walk again, that would allow him to become Robin again. But there was too many complications - nerve and bone damage in one leg meant he couldn't put weight on it. I think there was something with the spine too, maybe it was weak? I can't remember. Anyway, it got really crazy, kid ended up amputating the damaged leg, so he could use a prosthetic instead.

**YALE: Oh my God.**

JOKER: That's the reason I choose Damian as my partner. Any thirteen-year-old who can cut off his own leg so he can build a robot suit is always going to be my first choice.  **[Laughs.]**  He still uses it today, that's why nobody knows.

**YALE: That's...**

JOKER: Not the worse that happened.

**YALE: No, I suppose not.**

**[At this point, our food arrived. There was a brief pause while we started eating.]**

**YALE: If you don't mind me asking... why were you 'called in' to help Mr. Wayne?**

JOKER: You know anyone else with a couple decades worth of experience dealing with grown men who dress up as flying rodents?

**YALE: No... I can't say that I do.**

JOKER: Bats- Bruce and I know each other pretty well. I think we know the other better then we know ourselves. Damian... was the closest I've ever seen him to losing it entirely. I think if I hadn't been there, standing right in front of him, reminding him that the world was still full of bad people, that he still had a mission, he would have gone entirely off the deep end.

**YALE: You probably saved his life.**

JOKER: I didn't think of it like that, back then. I was trying to save him, sure, but only because I didn't want to lose my bat. I'd lived my entire adult memory up until that point completely around the idea of the bat. A world without him...? It was...  **[He pauses, and for a moment, in his eyes, I can see the look of a man thinking about the end of the world.]** I couldn't live like that. I had to do something.

**YALE: Our records say that you _fought_  the bat for as long as you've known him. Some even said that you wanted to kill him. Why would that change? Why side with him in the war.**

**[He shrugs, picks at his food, and evades the question.** **]**

**YALE: Do you feel this state of mind led to the start of the war?**

JOKER: I think that places the blame of the war on the bat.

**YALE: Some argue that it was his fault.**

JOKER: It  _wasn't._

**[For a moment, there's a fire about him, that scares me. I can see in every scar and smile line the creature that was the Clown Prince of Crime. The monster under people's beds. Then its gone.]**

JOKER: The war was many people's fault. The bat was there for it, like he was there for every other thing that went wrong in Gotham. But it he didn't cause it. You can't blame the police if they show up at a murder scene, the same goes for him.

**YALE: Do you believe that?**

JOKER: More then anything.

**YALE: ... Let's talk about the war. Most people think that the Town Hall Riot was the first, open, declaration of war. What are your thoughts on that?**

JOKER: It wasn't the first declaration of war. The military moving in; suspending the police force, imposing a curfew, monitoring the school systems, posting a ban on weapons... those were acts of war.

**YALE: Those were measures intended to halt Gotham's fall into anarchy. They were trying to help.**

JOKER: I was trying to help when I told people that life was a joke and death was the punchline. Obviously, most of them didn't take someone trying to alter their entire way of life very well.

**YALE: So do you believe Gotham had a right to become the self-governing, insiders-only city that it was trying to be?**

JOKER: Can't rightfully say, my dear.  **[He smiles with all his teeth.]** I'm just a clown, I'm not good at those sort of questions.  **[He laughs.]**  I'd recommend asking Bruce.

**YALE: Fair enough... what were your thoughts on the Town Hall Riot, when it was happening?**

JOKER:  **[Laughs.]**   _Someone_  fucked up on that one. Fucked up badly. Overall? Worst idea ever, probably. I knew that when it happened. I watched the whole thing go down on TV in Arkham.  **[He laughs again, then turns serious.]** I don't think anyone realized at the time what was starting.

**YALE: You don't think anyone knew that they'd be retaliated against?**

**[He pauses, for a long time, as if he's trying to one up with a good answer.]**

JOKER: I don't think any of us knew what we were capable of.

**YALE: Do you regret the war?**

JOKER: Not for a second.

**YALE: ... Not... Not even... A lot of people... died.**

**[For a moment, there's silence, as he thinks about it. Then, slowly, he smiles, with the most terrifying grin I've ever seen, and laughs, low and hard, mimicking the sounds heard on many battlefields, on a hundred broadcasts, on hours of TV.]**

JOKER:  _Excellent_. _  
_

**[The interview was concluded a few minutes afterwards.]**


End file.
